Hunt stretches around globe as Snowden seeks asylum in Ecuador

This photo provided by The Guardian Newspaper in London shows Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, in Hong Kong, Sunday, June 9, 2013. (AP Photo/The Guardian)

By Richard A. Serrano and Sergei L. Loiko
Tribune Washington Bureau

Published: June 24, 2013;Last modified: June 24, 2013 09:56AM

MOSCOW - The hunt for Edward Snowden stretched around the globe Sunday as the 30-year-old leaker of U.S. classified material flew out of Hong Kong under cover of darkness, dropped into the protective embrace of Russia and made plans to hopscotch through Cuba and Venezuela to eventual asylum in Ecuador.

His stealthy movements, aided by the anti-secrecy WikiLeaks organization and its high-powered lawyers, played out like an international game of Where’s Waldo. The American citizen - a traitor to some and a folk hero to others - kept a step ahead of his government, which has charged him with violating the Espionage Act and revoked his U.S. passport in an effort to bring him to ground.

In his rush to elude arrest, the onetime low-level computer analyst appeared to be showing up the most powerful national security apparatus in the world, just as his campaign to expose vast U.S. surveillance programs had embarrassed the Obama administration by contradicting the president’s pledge to run a government with an “unprecedented level of openness.”

With the collusion of several governments, Snowden managed over the weekend to make Washington appear stumped in its attempts to extradite the former National Security Agency contract worker for leaking details of secret phone and Internet eavesdropping programs.

The drama afforded nations with histories of being thorns in the side of the U.S. a rare and low-cost opportunity to frustrate the administration.

Nevertheless, administration officials remained confident that, despite not succeeding in having Snowden detained in Hong Kong, they will eventually catch their man. “The belt will tighten. We will get him,” said one Department of Justice official, speaking anonymously because of the delicate matter of handling both a criminal case and an awkward game of multinational diplomacy.

Obama is not the only party to the drama caught in the contradictory politics of secrecy. Snowden has portrayed himself as a campaigner for openness and freedom of the press. However, Ecuador, his apparent haven in South America, has had a checkered history on that score. This month, the Ecuadorean Congress, at President Rafael Correa’s insistence, passed a law that prohibits news organizations from publishing classified or confidential government documents or material from personal documents without their owner’s permission.

Any hopes that Justice Department and national security officials might have had for gaining a helping hand from Moscow appeared frustrated Sunday by indications that Russia, like Hong Kong, did not appear to want to keep Snowden for long.

“Moscow sees his presence as a big unasked-for headache and pretends he is not here,” said Andrei Kortunov, president of the New Eurasia Foundation, a Moscow think tank. “Moscow is being very cautious as on the one hand it doesn’t want to further damage their relations with the United States and on the other, it doesn’t want to appear (to be) bowing to Americans.”

U.S. prosecutors charged Snowden on a criminal complaint filed under seal June 14, accusing him of unauthorized communication of national defense information and providing U.S. classified intelligence to an unauthorized person, both Espionage Act violations, as well as theft of government property. He faces 30 years in prison, and potentially much more if federal prosecutors follow through with a grand jury indictment in the next 60 days, which they plan to do.

“The chase is on,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who agreed that time was of the essence, especially since Snowden has suggested that he is on the brink of revealing more classified secrets.

“I wanna get him caught and brought back for trial,” the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “And I think we need to know exactly what he has. He could have a lot, lot more. It may really put people in jeopardy.”

Washington was trying to anticipate Snowden’s moves and halt his dash toward a safe harbor.

“Persons wanted on felony charges, such as Mr. Snowden, should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States,” said Jen Psaki, spokeswoman at the State Department.

The Justice Department’s spokeswoman, Nanda Chitre, said, “We will pursue relevant law enforcement cooperation with other countries where Mr. Snowden may be attempting to travel.”

The prosecution of Snowden became public Friday evening when the Justice Department unsealed the week-old criminal complaint. It was at that moment, said one Justice Department official, that discussions between the United States and Hong Kong went flat: the spying charges “raised political concerns and put a new dimension on things,” he said.

Snowden, the official said, was never “detained” in Hong Kong or held “under any kind of police protection” while he was residing at an undisclosed safe house. Crucially for the U.S., there was a delay in getting Hong Kong to respond to the criminal warrant and arranging an extradition hearing.

Top officials in Hong Kong also needed to brief the Chinese government in Beijing about detaining Snowden for extradition back to the United States.

“There was a lot of red tape, but we thought it would get done,” the official said.

Jeffrey Bader, a senior White House adviser on China during Obama’s first term, surmised that Hong Kong would have had latitude to decide what to do with Snowden without Beijing’s interference. Either way, he said, Hong Kong was “probably happy to get this off their plate.”

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The U.S. had expected Hong Kong to follow through on Washington’s request to deliver Snowden over for prosecution, according to another Justice Department official. On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. telephoned his counterpart in Hong Kong, Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen, “stressing the importance of the matter and urging Hong Kong to honor our request for Snowden’s arrest,” he said.

Also working their channels were U.S. State Department and Consulate officials in the Chinese city, as well as FBI agents talking to their colleagues there.

But when the criminal complaint was made public, Hong Kong asked for more information about the charges and for “evidence” against Snowden. The official said the U.S. “was in the process of responding ... when we learned that Hong Kong authorities had allowed the fugitive to leave Hong Kong.” The final response of the city’s administration to the U.S. was that it “found our request insufficient,” he said.

Hong Kong officials said Sunday that without “sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr. Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.”

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Snowden landed Sunday afternoon at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. He was taken by car under some sort of Russian protection to what the U.S. official said was a “comfort zone” in the airport transit area.

A Russian Foreign Ministry official, also speaking not for attribution, said Snowden indicated he had planned to leave Monday for Caracas, Venezuela, via Havana. But then the Ecuadorean ambassador to Russia, apparently at Snowden’s request, arrived at the airport. With the ambassador’s car idling out front, the two men launched into private discussions.

Snowden then said he would seek political asylum in Ecuador, the Russian Foreign Ministry official said, and booked a seat on a 6 a.m. Aeroflot flight to Havana, with plans to push on to Caracas and then to Quito.

Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Richardo Patino said simply in a brief Twitter message: “The government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward Snowden.”

Snowden may have chosen Ecuador because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been claiming asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for a year. Assange is trying to dodge criminal charges of sexual assault in Sweden and possible criminal prosecution in the U.S. for publishing classified material allegedly leaked by Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is being court-martialed this summer at Fort Meade, Md.

Now WikiLeaks has come to the aid of Snowden. “He is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from WikiLeaks,” the organization said in a statement.

WikiLeaks quoted a prominent former Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, who is now the organization’s legal director and Assange’s attorney, as saying: “What is being done to Mr. Snowden and to Mr. Julian Assange - for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest - is an assault against the people.”